


AN ADDRESS, 


Re-Dedication of the State Normal 
School Building, 


AT YPSILANTI, APRIL 18, 1860 



BY JOHN M. GREGORY, 

Superintendent of Public Instruction . 
































CORRESPONDENCE. 


-*♦<- 

Ypsilanti, April 28, 1860. 

Hon. J. M. Gregory, 

Dear Sir: —Believing that the circulation of your Address, delivered 
on the occasion of the re - dedication of the Michigan Normal School, 
would powerfully promote a just understanding of the true aims and pro¬ 
cesses of primary education, we respectfully request its publication. 


A. S. WELCH, 

D. P. MAYHEW, 

J. M. B. SILL, 
GEORGE E. DUDLEY. 

E. M. FOOTE, 
ALBERT MILLER, 


JOHN G00DIS0N, 

J. F. CAREY, 

MRS. A. D. ALDRICH, 
ELLEN A. HURLBUT, 
SUSAN G. TYLER. 


ADDRESS AT THE RE-DEDICATION OF THE NORMAL 

SCHOOL HOUSE, APRIL 10th, 1860. 

By the Superintendent of Public Instruction. 

(.Published by request of the Faculty of the Normal School .) 

O NCE more the Normal School Building stands erect 
and ready for use. Restored from the desolations of 
that fatal fire which, last October, swept it from battle¬ 
ment to base and turned its glory to ashes, it rises, now, 
again, in more beautiful outline and more convenient ar¬ 
rangement for the high public uses for which it was ori¬ 
ginally constructed. The old foundations tried and true 
as that sound and sterling public sentiment in which the 
institution found its origin, and these walls which the 
devouring flames, as if in reverence for their well won re¬ 
nown, forbore to demolish, are here as representatives of 
the past history of the school,—of the age before the fire, 
—and seem to say in their silent but solid way, that what¬ 
ever was substantial and fundamental in the past, still 
remains. The new parts, in their more convenient and 
tasteful arrangements, tell of progress made, and are preg¬ 
nant with a voiceless prophecy of other improvements in 
the school itself, which the experience of the past has 
dictated and rendered possible. Thus the Building rises 






2 


before us, like the institution it shelters, a compound of 
the Past and the Future —of history and promise. 

But let me not be understood to imply that we to-day 
inaugurate the Normal School afresh: it is only the 
building which we re-dedicate. It was not the Normal 
School which perished in the fire : it was only the house 
it dwelt in, which fell a victim to the flames. Like some 
crustacean which, supplying the place of its cast off shell 
with a new and more commodious covering, carries all the 
vitality of the old organism over into the new dwelling, so 
the Normal School itself has known no interruption or 
abatement of its power or work. With an unconquered 
and unconquerable vigor, it bent but a moment under the 
blow that fell upon it, and ere the ashes of its old home 
were grown cold, the measured tramp of its unsurpassed 
discipline was heard in new halls, and the spirit of its 
severe and earnest scholarship was busying itself with new 
lessons and pluming its wings for higher achievements. 
And we are here to-day to welcome it* back to the old 
haunts, and to reinstate it in these walls which it has 
hallowed with its useful work. It comes with the solid 
foundations of its ancient discipline unshaken, and the 
superstructure of its old time scholarship unmoved. The 
new value and beauty of its renovated house do but sym¬ 
bolize the brighter glory and nobler work it is destined to 
achieve. It comes back with the vernal flowers and spring 
time birds to its chosen seats, as if it, too, were putting 
forth afresh after “the winter of its discontent” for a 
loftier growth and a more abundant fruitage. From its 
winter quarters, or its winter campaign rather, it comes to 
re-occupy these heights with undiminished numbers, and, 
with unabated hope and strength, to renew its contests 
with ignorance and vice. Long may it flourish to train 
yet other laborers for the great fields of Universal educa¬ 
tion, and to advance the teaching art to a wider and 
grander reach of power. 

In re-dedicating, to-day, the Normal School building 
to its appointed work, it seems fitting to the occasion, and 
not unprofitable for the enterprize, that we shall review 
the relations of a Normal School to the general school 
system of the State. After the lapse, and in the light, of 
several years of successful experiment we may more safely 
and more certainly define its exact sphere, and pronounce 
upon its true utility; and a careful restatement of its 


3 


aims and capacities, may both aid its development and win 
for it a still more cordial as well as more consistent sup¬ 
port. 

1. The first and most obvious work of the Normal 
School—the work which furnishes its central and construc¬ 
tive idea—is that of educating teachers. I choose this term 
as embracing more than that of professional training , or 
teaching the art of teaching; for the true training of a 
teacher necessarily includes, to some extent, the idea of 
general education, or instruction, in branches of learning. 

It is sufficient for the student in the law or medical 
schools to possess such a knowledge of the elementary 
branches of learning as shall fit him to study intelligently 
the law book or the medical treatise. It is the ready and 
correct application of legal principles, or the skillful ad¬ 
ministration of medicinal agents that he wishes to acquire; 
and the branches of ordinary learning are only paths and 
helps by which he reaches his end. It is law, not learn¬ 
ing which he expects to administer; medicine to the 
stomach, not mathematics to the mind. 

But these branches of common learning are the very 
tools of his trade to the teacher. They are the statutes 
by which are to be tested and governed the processes of 
his pupils’ minds ; the aliments by which the scholar is 
to be nourished into strength ; the fields on w r hich he is 
to be exercised, and the mighty and magnificent posses¬ 
sions into which he is to be inducted. The teacher’s pro¬ 
fessional skill consists not merely in the knowledge of pro¬ 
cesses of teaching and principles of Pedagogy ; but in a 
close and intimate acquaintance as well, with the know¬ 
ledges in which he is to instruct. 

The gereral scholar may be permitted to pass the 
studies of Arithmetic and Grammar, for example, with a 
sound knowledge of their general principles and applica¬ 
tions, such as the Academy or Union School will afford 
him, but the teacher must study these sciences with a 
far deeper reach of analysis. Penetrating within their 
profounder depths, he must carefully measure the steps 
by which they grow up from ultimate facts and axiom¬ 
atic truths, that he may see clearly the path by which 
the mind of his pupil mounts up to their full compre¬ 
hension. He must go over their territory as a general 
goes over a proposed battle-field, and mark with a close 
survey every point where his pupils will have to grapple 


4 


in stern encounter with each new principle and varying 
process. He must carefully scan the natural and logical 
connections of fact with fact and truth with truth, for 
it is along these connections that the intellect travels 
in its attainment of science. 

Each study, too, should he known to the teacher in 
its picturesque and poetic relations; in those pleasant 
and attractive analogies and resemblances in which the 
power of illustration resides, and by virtue of which 
historic time becomes a great territory with epochs and 
centuries for continents and kingdoms; or a mighty 
stream with rushing nationalities filling its channels, now 
confluent, now divergent, as the tides of national life ebb 
or flow; by which language grows up as a tree from its radical 
words, as roots, parting in its upward growth into dia¬ 
lects, idioms, sentences, and bearing as its ripened fruit 
the rich treasures of eloquence and song; by which in¬ 
deed each science, and subdivision of a science, finds 
in natural scenery, some fitting symbol through which it 
can be made clearer to the childish sense. Truth exists 
in nature only as a concrete—never in abstract—and the 
mind must have gone far on in its educational progress 
ere it can dispense with the aid of sensible representa¬ 
tions in its attempts to grasp pure abstract truths. 

Is it not apparent, then, from all this that the Edu¬ 
cation of Teachers , which we have already admitted to 
be the first and most obvious work of the Normal School, 
must embrace as one of its main elements, this thorough 
and exhaustive instruction in the common branches of 
learning ? 

The other and co-ordinate element of the educa¬ 
tion of teachers is the knowledge of the mental faculties 
answering to these sciences. God has set over against 
each other the human intellect and the fields of know¬ 
ledge. For each realm and part of science there is an 
answering mental power,—an eye for the beautiful, an 
ear for melody, a memory for facts, a conscience for 
virtue, a taste for the {esthetic, a reason for relations 
and ultimate truths; and thus for every order of know¬ 
ledge, from the lowest to the highest, whether in ma¬ 
thematics or metaphysics, in physical science or philo¬ 
sophy, a responsive faculty and process of the mind has 
been ordained. Each study calls into exercise its own 
appropriate faculty or set of faculties, and the true 


5 


teacher must be trained to know the faculties which 
each study requires for its conquest, and which each is 
adapted to cultivate. 

But these faculties have, also, each their own time of 
appearing in the unfolding mind of the child, and their 
own laws of development and growth. The senses begin 
their work when the eye opens to the light and the ear 
drinks in the sweet music of the mother’s voice. Sen¬ 
sation speedily ripens into Perception, and the little 
mind comes to know and believe in an external objective 
world. A few months later Memory follows. The con¬ 
sciousness recognizes the identity of repeated perceptions, 
and the child remembers the mother’s face. Perception 
growing stronger, attends to resemblances, contrasts and 
other relations which furnish to Memory her chains of as¬ 
sociation whereby she holds her treasures. Soon Imagina¬ 
tion begins to paint pictures for the dreams of hope. But 
not till childhood has ripened far towards manhood does 
the highest Reason come with its grand abstractions and 
broad generalizations. 

The appetites awaken with the senses themselves. The 
passions unfold in their seasons through the growing years. 
Conscience comes to be a controlling power, only after 
the understanding has compassed the high distinctions of 
right and wrong, and acknowledged the universal obliga¬ 
tions of virtue. 

How unwise and futile the teaching that takes no 
notice of this successive development of the mental powers 
and faculties, but sets the pupil to the work of learn¬ 
ing logical abstractions while the reason still sleeps in 
its infancy, and memory is wholly unfurnished with the 
facts on which all reasoning must proceed, if it proceeds 
safely. 

It is obvious, therefore, that the professional training 
of the teacher in this second department—this knowledge 
of the mental faculties which it is his business to de¬ 
velop—must proceed in conjunction with the study of 
the knowledges to which these faculties respectively ap¬ 
ply. Not the mind alone, by itself,—the mind as an 
isolated and unadapted power,—but the mind as the in¬ 
strument of knowledge, and answering in its development 
to the natural order and relations of science, such is the 
mind the teacher is to educate. 

Indeed, a true science of education must have these 


6 


two parallel facts as its basis,—1st, a logical connection 
of sciences growing out of, or succeeding each other, in 
a certain natural order, and 2d, a logical development 
of the mental powers, unfolding from each other in an 
established natural sequence. These two answer to each 
other with an unvarying fidelity. Without pausing here 
to indicate the natural order of the sciences, as I have 
briefly hinted at the order of mental development, it is 
sufficient to my present purpose to remark that all school 
room arts or processes of teaching must be based upon 
these observed connections and sequences of knowledges, 
and these responding developments of mind. 

The education, then, which it is the business of the 
Normal School to provide, must comprise both the study 
of science and the study of mind. In the light of these 
two the whole art of teaching stands. 

2. But the education of teachers is not the only 
service which the Normal School can render the cause of 
public education. Next to furnishing to teachers profes- 
sional instruction, is the promotion among them of that 
professional interest and feeling, that esprit du corps , 
which will animate and sustain them in their work. 
This spirit the Normal School may largely serve to pro¬ 
duce and maintain. 

It has already accomplished much in this direction, 
first by exhibiting to teachers themselves the real dignity 
and importance of their work, and next by elevating the 
business of teaching, in the public esteem. All reflect¬ 
ing minds must, have observed the increasing estimation 
in which teachers are held in our State within the past 
five or ten years. 

And this increasing regard for the teacher's calling is 
itself a most important element and condition, in the 
work of supplying teachers for the schools. No employ¬ 
ment will command the life-long services of any consi¬ 
derable number of educated people, which degrades them 
below their due place in the public estimation. If it be 
asked why so few young men and women have adopted 
teaching as a permanent business, the reply must cer¬ 
tainly be, not merely nor mainly because of the inade¬ 
quate remuneration, for the wages of able and experien¬ 
ced teachers are usually higher than those of clergymen 
in the same communities ; but because of the low esteem 
in which teachers have been held. It is not the pros- 


7 


pect of making more money, but the certainty of gaining 
more influence—of being more a man among men—that 
induces so many of the graduates of our Normal School 
and Colleges to leave the ranks of teachers and betake 
themselves to the law, or the pulpit. 

When the village schoolmaster shall come to hold as 
high and as influential a place in the community as the 
village lawyer or clergyman or doctor, then will the 
schoolmaster's place be as permanently filled as either of 
these others. Till then we must be content to see the 
Teacher's office occupied by young men who pause in it 
only till they can enter the broader arena, and strive for 
the loftier prizes of the recognized professional life. 

It would be easy to prove that no nobler calling 
exists among men than that of the teacher. Working 
on human souls—the most valuable and enduring of all 
materials, and wielding the knowledges—those most po¬ 
tential of all agencies, all society bends to the influence of 
his work, and the unending ages bear the stamp and 
impress of his power. No other so deeply affects the 
national life as he, and no other finds opportunities to 
establish so strong a personal influence over men, as that 
of the teacher over his pupils. Such men as Dr. Arnold 
of England and Dr. Nott of America, have, through 
their pupils, influenced the policy of their respective na¬ 
tions, and many a teacher of less note has been, through 
life, counted as the confidential adviser of the men whom 
he has educated. Through their pupils, Aristotle, Py¬ 
thagoras, Luther and Loyola ruled the world. 

Nor are the personal advantages of the teacher's cal¬ 
ling less marked and valuable. No other profession is 
so favorable to high culture and extensive learning. 
Teaching is itself the most effective method of study, 
and the teacher who studies as well as teaches can not 
fail of ripe and accurate scholarship. I here assert my 
full and deliberate conviction that a careful and thorough 
comparison of its power, its usefulness, its influence on 
jDersonal character and happiness, will show the teacher's 
profession second to no other in its claims upon young 
men of talent and in the advantages it offers them. In 
all the elements of real grandeur and far reaching power, 
in the nobleness and benignity of its work, and as a 
stand point of mightiest influence over man and society, 
it knows few equals and no superiors among the employ¬ 
ments of men. 


8 


And may we not confidently expect that the day will 
come when this fashion of studying law, as if that were 
the only, or most direct highway to influence and honor 
and wealth, shall cease ? Will not the time come when 
the thronging squadrons of brave spirits that now rush 
upon this bridge of Lodi, will pause and notice how few 
live to reach the farther shore; how many fall in the 
mire and are trodden under foot, and how many, even, 
of the victors come off with the glory and beauty of 
their moral manhood all scarred and withered—maimed of 
their noblest impulses, and having lost all but their 
suspicious astuteness and the keen glittering intellect by 
whose sharpness they have won their way ? Even now 
the world looks upon the young man entering the law 
as a self-devoted victim to the demon of personal am¬ 
bition, and counts him henceforth as one to be watched 
and feared. A truer personal culture, and the higher 
views of life which will grow out of a finer civilization, 
will come in time to lead our best minds to the less 
noisy but wider fields of power open to him who de¬ 
votes himself to teaching mankind. In the retrospects of 
history we have long since awarded the high places of 
honor to the teachers of the race. Aristotle, Plato, So¬ 
crates, Pythagoras, — these are among the really great 
names of history, and the empire they established over 
the minds of men long survived the crumbling capitals 
of the kings of their day. If it be said that these were 
only the highest grade of teachers, the born kings of 
philosophy and pedagogy, the reply comes ready, so also 
the lawyers and the physicians who give character and 
currency to their profession, are the few chiefs,—the un¬ 
distinguished masses shine only with a borrowed lustre. 
Strike out a Blackstone, a Mansfield, a Coke, a 
Marshall, a Webster, a Clay, a few regal names that 
have made the bar radiant with the light of their ge¬ 
nius, and the law would lose speedily enough the at¬ 
traction which now allures so many young men emulous 
of Webster’s honor and of Clay’s renown. 

I would not be understood to disparage the profes¬ 
sion of the lawyer. It was my own chosen profession, 
and the only one which I regularly studied. Much less 
would I institute invidious comparisons between the dif¬ 
ferent professions. I would only, in justice to the teacher, 
and to our school system, strip it of the delusive glit- 


9 


ter in which a false ambition has clothed it, and let it 
stand side by side with the other professions as being 
like them the simple arena in which courage and patient 
toil and true merit can alone succeed, and whose crown 
of success, as rarely and as hardly won as any other, is 
after all no brighter or more glorious than that won in 
any other calling. I stand here, only, to claim boldly, 
and in the face of the whole country, that the teacher's 
place is as high and as useful as that of any other 
human employment, and to say to the present and all 
coming generations of students in this Normal School, 
“ Cleave to your business ”—There is no other field where 
you may do nobler work—work that the world will not 
forget, or where you may wield a wider influence and 
win a grander name. All the elements of real greatness 
and power are here. Spurn the delusive cry that would 
lead you to the lower and muddier forum, noisy with 
the strifes of selfish demagogues, which it is foolish to 
mistake for the struggles of genius and the breath of 
fame. A nobler and more lasting influence is yours. It 
is not the noisy tempest that goes shouting over the 
continents, and rouses the ocean into tumult that drives 
this great world forward in its course. It is the silent 
but strong attraction, which reaching down from the great 
central light, lays its hands softly upon each mountain 
and molecule, and binds each to the great centres of 
influence and power. 

So the real motor forces in society and government are 
not the noisy mob-like movements of political campaigns or 
the feverish rush of trade and commerce, but the 
teaching that comes to lay its hand silently upon the 
hearts of men, and binds them by the potent strands of 
truth, to the great centres of Home and Heaven. It 
may be more congenial to the impetuous spirit of a too 
thoughtless youth to ride on the crested wave and to 
mingle shouts with the storm ; but it is the mark of a 
truer and wiser soul to stand calmly by the capital 
places of power, and to lay thoughtful and mighty hands 
upon those great attractive forces to which the storm 
itself must bend in stilled and patient submission at 
last. 

Already the Teacher's profession in its higher ranks 
has successfully asserted its claim to public honor. The 
professorships in our Colleges and Universities are counted 


10 


prizes, which even the lawyer does not disdain to covet, 
and the Judge gladly accepts. No name is more coveted 
and more frequently assumed for the honor it is sup¬ 
posed to bring than that of professor. Let the same 
ripened experience and ripened learning be found as it 
certainly may come to be, in the common school, and 
the homlier title, Schoolmaster may be worn with like 
honor. Why may we not, indeed, look to see in the com¬ 
ing years a race of dignified scholarly men and women, 
passing their lives in the noble work of training children, 
in the common schools,—the stately residence of the set¬ 
tled schoolmaster rising beside the dwellings of the at¬ 
torney, the minister and the physician ? Germany has 
thousands of such men, men working in the common 
school but with as much learning and cultivation as are 
found in our college professors,—men of genius, authors, 
scholars of rare attainments, gathering around them li¬ 
braries and all the refinements of a literary home, but 
still schoolmasters, busy daily with the great and to them 
holy and delightful work of training the intellects and 
hearts of little children. 

The model schoolmaster of the close of the nine¬ 
teenth century will be quite a different figure from Do¬ 
minie Sampson or Ichabod Crane. A true and high cul¬ 
ture will lend dignity to both his mind and manners. A 
broad-breasted, generous philanthropy, enobled and inspired 
by his scholarly pursuits, will give to his presence both 
grace and power. Borrowing from his association with 
childhood, simplicity and truth, and from his studies wis¬ 
dom and strength, he will dwell among his neighbors, 
the courteous gentleman, the revered citizen, the prudent 
counsellor and the beloved friend. 

It is to the education of such teachers, and to the 
cultivation of a professional spirit that shall retain such 
teachers in their chosen sphere, that we, to-day, re-de- 
dicate this Normal school house. We ask the Normal 
School not only to send us well educated teachers, but 
to make teaching honorable,—to inspire in its pupils, and 
to show to the world, by all the light and glory of its 
best demonstrations, this higher and truer view of the 
Teacher's work,—to lift the art of the Educator into 
such true and honorable esteem that it may attract to 
its fields of labor, its due share of the best minds, and 
may assist and reward their efforts with the due meed 


11 


of public regard. In short, we ask of it, as far as’its in¬ 
fluence extends, to make the teacher’s work a permanent 
life-work, and to save us from the mortification of seeing, 
annually, some of its most promising graduates laying 
aside the robes of their high office, and turning aside into 
the noiser but not nobler pursuits of politics and law. 

3. But there is still remaining a third department or 
sphere of labor into which the Normal School should ex¬ 
tend its efforts. It is the investigation and advancement 
of the Science of Education. 

The science of Education is yet in its infancy. After 
nearly six thousand years of daily observation of child¬ 
hood, and of the eager delight with which successive gen¬ 
erations of parents have marked each step of progress in 
their children, each new forthputting of the childish intel¬ 
ligence, we have to stand here, in the afternoon of this 
Nineteenth century, and confess that among the sciences 
which have been unfolded by human genius, some of them 
scarcely a century old, there is none so imperfect, so 
nearly unknown even, as the science of Education. The 
Mathematician constructs his equations, and with an uner¬ 
ring confidence points his finger to a new planet hidden in 
the far off heavens. The chemist applies his reagents and 
tests and pronounces with a positive certainty upon the 
elementary character of whatever compound comes under 
his eye, detecting the faintest traces of any substance 
which hides within it. The anatomist finds a single bone 
and reconstructs in thought, the animal to which it be¬ 
longed though no human eye ever saw it alive. The me¬ 
taphysician pursues truth with his subtle analysis till she 
stands revealed in the absolute and unconditioned. The 
agriculturist applies his culturing art with an assured con¬ 
fidence to the growing corn. But what mathematics has 
yet measured the orbits of the mind ? What chemistry 
has taught the potencies of truth, or traced the indica¬ 
tions of latent genius ? What agriculture has prescribed 
the seed time or harvest of the soul, or revealed the art 
by which the budding intellect shall be ripened into mature 
growth ? 

What, indeed, are almost all the processes of our schools 
but the tame re-travel of beaten paths, or the rank empi¬ 
ricism of unphilosophical experiment? How uncertain, in 
any given case, is the result which shall flow from the 
schooling of our children ? Where is the school which is 


12 


not in some part and to some extent still, a Procrustean 
bed ; the pupil that is too short must stretch or be 
stretched; the pupil that is unfortunately of too tall a 
growth for the ordinary course of puerilities must lose his 
head or take to his heels. How many ruined intellects, 
spoiled in the training, lie scattered through the land, tell¬ 
ing of the fatal mistakes made in the school rooms. 

I would not make any sweeping condemnation. It is 
of the lack of certainty in our educational art as applied 
to any given case, of which I speak. The divine adjust¬ 
ments of nature’s truths to the human mind are so mani¬ 
fold and healthful, and the power of a strong and edu¬ 
cated mind over a weak and ignorant one is so plastic and 
inspiring, that our schools have yielded rich harvests of 
good, in spite of their lack of science ; but how much the 
result depends upon chance. Who can pronounce with 
certainty upon the school-fate of any group of pupils, 
or say whether the school shall develop any or all of them 
into true scholars and educated men? Our teachers are 
miners prospecting for intellectual gold, rather than artists 
working the rich metal into shapes of predetermined use and 
beauty. They apply to the mass of childhood the com¬ 
mon processes of the school, hopeful of the result, but know¬ 
ing ho art by which they may convert the uncertainty 
into a triumph—the possibility into a ripened certainty of 
good. 

Nor would I underrate the labors of modern educators, 
in thus pronouncing upon the. immaturity of educational 
science. Many a patient thinker is at work in our schools 
striving to learn the true laws of mental growth, and the 
certain processes of mental culture. Franke, Pestalozzi, 
and Rousseau, Lock and Milton have wrought and writ¬ 
ten, and through the labors of such as these the pos¬ 
sibility of a science of education has been fully proved. 
The Normal School itself is a testimony to the growing 
belief of the State that education is a science to be studied, 
and that educational art may be reduced to fixed laws and 
rules. 

But the Normal School must still, to a great, extent, 
discover the science which it teaches. It finds no standard 
authorities or extensive libraries of professional literature 
prepared to its hands; no ponderous tomes written by 
some Blackstone or Kent of Pedagogy, no huge digests 
of reported cases and decisions of learned judges of the 


13 


schoolroom, no Cooper on mental anatomy and surgery, 
no Eberle on medical practice for the mind, no great 
volume of Therapeutics or Materia Medica for the maladies 
of the soul. Save a few practical works, which may serve 
as manuals for school room duties, and a few hooks writ¬ 
ten to exhibit the statistics or prove the values of educa¬ 
tion, we have hut little in literature that claims consider¬ 
ation as educational science. Many partial hints lie 
scattered through the writings of our educational men, but 
no great text book of the science has yet appeared in our 
own language, at least. The Normal School is therefore 
called upon by the necessities of its work, to institute a 
systematic investigation of the fundamental laws and un¬ 
derlying principles of the proper scientific culture of the 
human powers—to seek to develop, in brief, a true science 
and art of pedagogy. 

A hasty glance at the aims of such an art will exhibit 
more fully the mission of the Normal School in this de¬ 
partment of its work. Taking the old and convenient tri¬ 
partite division of education into physical, intellectual and 
moral, I remark, first, that a true pedagogy will seek to 
develop and discipline the physical nature into a healthful 
growth and a vigorous strength, to make the body the fit 
residence and instrument of an educated soul. 

The need of physical education is already coming to be 
generally acknowledged ; but how much physical education 
can accomplish is but little understood. We ask of the 
Normal School to demonstrate both the methods and the 
measure of a true culture of the physical powers. The 
necessities of the intellect itself demand that this physical 
culture shall keep pace with the education of the mind. 
A perfect manhood has its muscular as well as its moral 
attributes, and the lack of one is nearly as fatal to the 
harmony of character and the happiness of life as of 
the other. 

We must look, therefore, to the teachers of our youth 
to take care of the bodies as well as of the minds of 
our children, to give lessons in gymnastics as well as in 
mathematics. With an efficient system of physical cul- 
turej our schools, instead of imperiling the health and 
lives even of their pupils, as they now do, and minister¬ 
ing to that physical degeneracy which too often follows 
and undermines a high civilization, might become im¬ 
portant accessories to the public health. 


14 


To aid in this work, I hope to see, ere long, upon 
these grounds, a spacious gymnasium in which the students 
of the Normal School may he disciplined daily in those 
exercises which will not only keep them in health as 
students, and send them forth in full strength and vigor, 
to their arduous work as teachers, but will also teach 
them the gymnastic arts with which they may train and 
exercise their own pupils in turn. 

In the mind, a true pedagogical art will seek to de¬ 
velop both knowledge and power, both the intelligence 
and the reason. It will aim to make its pupil an ac¬ 
tive, patient and independent thinker and a careful and 
constant observer. 

Doubtless there are wide native differences in the 
constitution of different minds, and all do not respond 
with equal readiness or fruitfulness to the teacher's art; 
but the testimony of many eminent and experienced teachers 
collected by Horace Mann, shows that 98 or 99 per 
cent, of all the children of the country might be edu¬ 
cated to become good and virtuous citizens. We ask 
the Normal School to help us settle how this maximum 
of education for the whole people may be attained. 

Our processes of education now educate mainly one 
or two powers, the memory and the judgment chiefly; 
we ask to have it demonstrated how all the faculties of 
the mind may be developed, and developed in harmony 
—how the quickened observation may be made to answer 
to the facts of nature; how the imagination and taste 
may be trained to respond to all that is aesthetic; how 
the entire world within may be made to reply to the 
world without—the subjective to the objective—and especially 
how the intellectual faculties may be established in know¬ 
ledge and strength to bear the burden and carry forward 
the business of both the earthly and the eternal life. 

We ask for light also upon those great questions 
which agitate the educational world,—of the relative va¬ 
lues of synthetic and analytic modes of instruction; of 
the uses of inductive and deductive methods in study, 
and of the philosophy and power of the objective and sub¬ 
jective pathways to knowledge. Of the brilliant circle of 
sciences which lie as a coronal of light around the brow 
of the nineteenth century, which shall enter into the 
curriculum of our common school studies ? How, in short, 
shall the advances of the world in science be made sub¬ 
servient to the intellectual development of mankind ? 


15 


But as human life is essentially moral—its highest 
aims and powers having a moral force and character—the 
last and controlling question in education is of its moral 
qualities. 

The molding power of education, grand and fruitful 
as it is, has its outer limits. These limits lie in the pur¬ 
poses of man's creation, the divinely appointed destinies 
of humanity. Man can not he safely or successfully edu¬ 
cated to any other mode of being or any other destiny than 
thoseto which his Maker designed him. Just as physi¬ 
cally he can not be matured into a quadruped, so morally 
and mentally he can not be trained into a mere mechanic 
or business man, nor into a mere scholar or book worm. 
There is a higher region of his nature, a realm of moral 
and religious powers, where man's true destinies unfold 
themselves and to which the other parts of his nature 
are but dependencies and tributaries. Says that profound 
French philosopher, Guizot, “Man can be comprehended 
only as a free moral being, that is, as a rational being ; 
but as a rational being it is impossible to comprehend his ex¬ 
istence if it be limited to the present world. In the very nat¬ 
ure of human reason, and of the relations of the human race 
to it, lies the idea of the destination of the race for a 
supermundane and eternal sphere. Reason is the germ 
of a development which is not and can not be reached 
here below." Royer Collard, another French philosopher, 
has said, “After his engagement to society, there still 
remains in him ( i . e. in man), the more noble part of 
his nature; those high faculties by which he elevates 
himself to God, to a future life and to the unknown 
blessings of the invisible world;" said a greater than 
Guizot or Collard, “Man's life consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things that he possesseth." 

To educate a man without any reference to his moral 
powers and destinies would be to place a ponderous lo¬ 
comotive on the track with burnished machinery and well 
oiled wheels, and to forget to generate any steam in 
the boiler; or filling it with steam, to neglect to place 
an engineer in command. The moral nature will not 
and can not be ignored. Trembling with the pent play 
of affections, wide reaching as the earth, and of ambitions 
vaulting as the heavens, of passions terrible in power as 
thunder storms, the moral nature overlies the intellect as 


* 


16 


the sky overlies the soil, and the intellect grows green 
and fruitful, or is scarred and withered as the moral 
nature refreshes it with sunshine and rains, or blasts it 
with droughts and tornadoes. 

A true pedagogy, therefore, will expend its highest 
art and exhaust its richest resources in giving develop¬ 
ment and direction to this noblest and most powerful 
part of our nature. The education that shall make us 
better as well as stronger—that shall make us true men, 
as well as good scholars, this is the education which our 
country and our age demands. We might well enough 
dispense with the schools which should only transform 
us into shrewder politicians, without making us purer pa¬ 
triots ; or craftier in trade, without making us more gen¬ 
erous friends and humane citizens. 

We ask then finally of the Normal School, that it 
shall seek not only to inspire its pupils with all that is 
humane and philanthropic in our Christian civilization, 
but teach them how to control the play of these fine 
moral forces in the hearts of their pupils; how to test 
the moral quality of each process of instruction and each 
mode of discipline; and how especially to impiint on 
each little heart and conscience the great lessons of love 
to God and love to man—of an integrity that will not 
bend, and of a truth that can not change. 

And, finally, Gentlemen and Ladies of the Faculty, 
in delivering again into your hands this beautiful and 
spacious building and this Normal School, we ask you 
to send us forth teachers worthy our State and of our 
times. If the University is the Head of our School System, 
the Normal School is the Heart. Through your pupils 
and your pupils’ pupils you send to the smallest and 
remotest primary school, the spirit that shall animate it; 
the style of scholarship that shall characterize it. You 
must send the life blood that shall quicken into action and 
endow with new strength the entire system. The pulse 
that throbs here will thrill to the extremities. Give us 
trained men as teachers of our youth; scatter light, and 
let’ an advancing civilization and a triumphing Christian¬ 
ity tell the story of your success in the great work of 
our age, the work of Universal Education. 






























































